Eva Vaculíková

* 1958

  • "Then we were trying to get the factory back. Again, it was not clear, because the factory was used by an agricultural cooperative at that time. Then, based on all the documents we had to provide and also on our correspondence with various ministries, the cooperative finally admitted that they had to return it to us. Well, they returned it to us in a terrible state. When they left the factory, they moved everything out so thoroughly that they even ripped the electricity out of the walls and broke the switches. The only thing they left were the oil machines, because they heated with heating oil. That was left there, but they said that they had to sell it to us, that they couldn't just give it away. So they sold it to us for, I don't know now, let's say for about fifty thousand. And when we wanted to try it out and heat the building, we found out that it didn't work at all. So we called the man who was in charge of it from the cooperative, and we wanted him to show us how to turn it on. And he says, 'This? This hasn't worked for years now...' So we went back again and said we'd been conned and asked if they wanted us to continue to post it somewhere or if they'd refund our money. So they said they would give us our money back. And when we wanted them to take it away, they said they wouldn't do it anymore, we should dispose of it ourselves. It meant knocking down two walls to get it out of there. Because there was no other way to do it. This was all so... At the time, it was just the way it was. And the people who were employed in that factory, in that co-operative (they cut gloves and grew oyster mushrooms there), they took it as us taking the factory. And again, we were the bad guys. Because we took it from them. We said, 'But that's not true, the factory never belonged to the cooperative. It's not written anywhere that we gave it away. It says everywhere that the owners were still the three of us. And the cooperative just used it. They never signed it.' Well, that's how we made more enemies in the village."

  • "By getting married, I found out ‘to whom I got married', I would say. It was during the first thing I did after getting married, changing my ID and my passport. First I filled out the paperwork and handed it in at the counter and the lady threw it back to me with some kind of gesture and said, 'You didn’t fill it out.' -'How so? I've got everything.' - 'You don't have any foreign relations there.' - 'I don't have any foreign relations, what do you mean?' - 'Your uncle.' - 'My uncle is in Bratřejov.' - 'Your husband's uncle and his brother. You don't have that listed here.' - 'I don't have any contact with them, I've never seen his brother, nor his uncle.' - 'Put them there.' So I stopped arguing, but I thought there must be something wrong. 'I don't even know their exact address, I just know their names.' - 'Then write down what you know.' So I wrote it down. Then I came home and I told my husband. He turned pale and said, 'It's impossible, what do they even want from you.' And then it became normal. The fact that my husband had a brother who went to Canada in '68, first emigrated from Yugoslavia to Austria and then to Canada... Because his uncle had been in Canada since around '49. Unfortunately, he defected from the army, so he was not allowed to ever come back, because he probably had a death sentence. That uncle then vouched for my brother-in-law. He guaranteed that he would take care of him there, so he could go to Canada to see him. So that started the trouble."

  • "The meeting was held at the U Klesků pub and I think there were around three hundred people there. There were wall-to-wall people, the pub was bursting at the seams. So basically, people came and they let out all the bitterness that accumulated in them over the years. The way everybody felt. The speeches were artless, just the farmers crying there. They were saying how they lost everything. How the communists had robbed them, how they had taken away the best things they had. How they broke their families, destroyed everything. Those people literally cried there. They cried and spoke about their problems. The meeting lasted a very long time, four or five hours."

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    Vizovice, 01.09.2022

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Her father-in-law left her Jan Palach‘s death mask

Eva Kulíšková in 1974
Eva Kulíšková in 1974
zdroj: Contemporary witness's archive

Eva Vaculíková, née Kulíšková, was born on April 25, 1958 in Gottwaldov (today‘s Zlín). Her mother‘s side of the family had a farm and fields in Bratřejov. Her grandfather, Antonín Trlica, refused to submit to collectivization, which negatively affected the whole family. Both of the contemporary witness’s older cousins faced complications in their studies after elementary school because of this decision. She spent her childhood mainly working with the cattle and looking after her little nephew. In 1977, she married Petr Vaculík. She never met his father, but the consequences of his actions affected her as well. Her father-in-law, Josef Vaculík, took an active interest in politics and helped those in need. He was friends with the academic sculptor Antonín Chromek, who created the monument of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk in Liptál. The unveiling ceremony on 28 October 1968 was preceded by a lot of work and arrangements, which her father-in-law gladly undertook. Another important achievement of these two men was the removal of the death mask of Jan Palach. This took place on January 23, 1969 with the written consent of Jan‘s brother, Jiří Palach. Josef Vaculík documented the whole process of removing the mask photographically. During the 1980s, the contemporary witness encountered difficulties in finding employment, caused by her father-in-law‘s activities in the 1950s and 1960s and the emigration of her husband‘s uncle and brother to Canada. After November 17, 1989, Eva and Petr Vaculík founded the Civic Forum in Liptál and participated in local politics. Among other things, they arranged for the return of the stolen TGM monument back to Liptál. In 1990, they also managed to get their nationalized factory back from the Unified Agricultural Cooperative (JZD) thanks to restitution, and they started their own business in the production of upholstered furniture there.